There have been a couple of these audio stories that felt like someone read a Wikipedia article about something they found interesting and decided to build a Doctor Who story around it. I… have not really enjoyed them.

There’s an interesting, even Ellulian, moral to this story about falling in love with the means and not thinking about the ends, but I think the story surrounding that moral could have been better done.

It took me three times to start and follow through on this one. The science was too wibbly wobbly, and I’m not invested enough in the First Doctor to care about it on those terms.

It took me a while to cotton on to some of the premise of this story—again, not being a Classic Who fan means mixing up characters means missing important details—and I’m still not sure I get all of it, but it was fun enough to give it some benefit of the doubt.

Silly and fun, this story wasn’t life changing (and I have a lot of questions about the fictional logic of things), but I enjoyed listening to it.

At first, I thought this was going to be gruesome and dumb, but it ended up turning into that special Doctor Who genre of the wildly misunderstood monster, and I really enjoyed listening to it while shoveling ice out of our cul-de-sac.

The Voyager record as inspiration for a Doctor Who story really ought to work for me, but it didn’t land. Maybe I’m tired of this series, or maybe I should have paid more attention instead of listening while cleaning.

I can’t say this one worked for me. I can kind of see the vibe that the author was going for, but I wasn’t a fan.

TARDIS dematerializing is responsible for famous elephant death (which I didn’t know about before listening) is not the fun Doctor Who story the author thinks it is. This felt like it was an extended excuse to riff on a historical anecdote, and it didn’t land at all for me.

The idea behind this one is fun—not least a BASIC interface on the TARDIS—but it doesn’t really deliver.

Fun homage to 50s sci-fi and old-timey radio shows. The performance and the conceit got me more than any of the plot did.

It can be surprising how dark and melancholy Doctor Who is sometimes, but this story does an excellent job of capturing that vibe in audio. Really enjoyed this one.

Yet another story that doesn’t really land with me because I don’t know Classic Who that well.

Good mix of a clever idea that holds the story together, alien world-building (including an alien comics shop, which earns full marks on its own), and some semi-meta reflection on the importance of wardrobe in this franchise.

I like parts of this, but there’s also some nonchalantness about grief that doesn’t work for me—and maybe a vibrator joke?

Even by Doctor Who’s famously wibbly wobbly standards, the rules of time travel make zero sense in this story, but it’s so fun that I don’t care.

Some fun gags, but this is another case where I think not knowing the classic series prevents me from appreciating this. Or maybe it’s just not that interesting?

Sometimes silly is good, and this story features a gorilla quoting Monty Python within a goofy but interesting premise, so I’m here for it.

This didn’t wind up being as meta as I’d hoped when I first realized where it was going, but it was fun and interesting.

Wondering if I should be reviewing these a volume at a time instead of a story at a time, but it’s too late now. This one felt like a Doctor Who story—if a bit darker than what we might see on TV—but that’s not entirely complimentary. Not bad, but nothing impressive in my book.

Up until the twist, this was a fun story—after the twist, it was fantastic. I really like the idea of filling the universe of Doctor Who with people who have their own stories and agency, and this did a good job of it.

Pretty fun story, but nothing you couldn’t have done outside of the Whoniverse. Time travel tropes galore, which I don’t mind but wasn’t particularly new either:

Meh. The TARDIS turning into a whale is a fun idea, but not enough of one to really intrigue me.

I wonder if I’d feel stronger about this if I knew Classic Who better. As is, it’s an interesting scifi concept that isn’t bad but doesn’t capture my attention as much as some of these other stories.

Doctor Who is a great series because it is vast enough to slot tiny stories of all shapes, sizes, and styles into the bigger universe. This fun story about the Doctor fixing a bike and bargaining with an alien ambassador was a great fulfillment of that potential.